Movin Forward

The last question (I think it is the last!) asks us how we are going to take this class experience forward. I have actually been thinking about this for a while. This semester has taken me on a quite a journey and it has ended up helping me make some decisions. I am enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Communication Studies next fall and a couple of areas have interested me. One is blogging. At first I thought that I would be looking at blogging as participatory media, but somehow that just didn't excite me too much. I also like what I have been studying in the Visual Rhetoric class. Specifically I have been looking at images in marketing for MMORPG computer games. Finally, I have the opportunity to complete my internship through BG working with Dr. Sue Carter with her two distance education courses.The distance education internship is what cinched it for me. I already have a good background in computers, but I need more experience in web design. We have touched on some basics with the software in this class, so I purchased the Studio MX suite and began teaching myself. In addition, I enrolled in three course this summer that cover Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Publisher. I hope to combine these skills and use them with the internship. My long-term goal is to study communication processes in distance education courses. I would love the opportunity to work in blogging as part of that process. I have not figured out how to work in the visual part and it may not be part of the equation in the long-run.

An additional interest of mine is gender studies. In fact, my Visual Rhetoric research has looked at gender (female) images on the game covers as part of the marketing plan for the computer game companies. To cross over into the distance education world, I might look at the differences in blogging between the genders in a distance education setting. So there it is. Research Course + Online Docs + Visual Rhetoric + Internship = Gender Differences in Blogging in Distance Education. That is the path I see myself going on over the next three years. Not bad for a semester or two's worth of work. Of course this is all subject to change and probably will within the next week, but I think that is what a good researcher does. You must constantly examine where you are and reevaluate your position. So that's it. Have a good night and a pleasant tomorrow.